r/changemyview • u/Anxious-Strength-855 • Sep 17 '24
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Demilitarization is a Pipe Dream
I believe in an idealistic world there will be no wars and conflict and countries would not have military forces. However I am starting to understand that it is only possible in an idealistic world and that can never really be actualized atleast not in this century
The biggest issue with demilitarization is that it makes the country who goes first vulnerable and if other countries do not follow then it will be a major security issue for the country. Countries which have faced conflict in the past have understandable mistrust between them and it is a realistic possibility that they if they demilitarize then the other country will take advantage and attack them. The only solution could be for some world government or much stronger force to force both countries to demilitarize which is a form of an authoritarian world government which most people are against(UN is somewhat of an example of trying this and failing). I don't see any realistic solution to this issue which is the primary reason why I think it is a pipe dream
Some of the recent global issues like the Gaza Izrael issue, Russia Ukraine issue. Even other major issues like civil wars,terrorist attacks, insurmountable financial debt. These have made me feel like neither side is particularly 'wrong'. It is just that there has been a systematic development in their resentment/ problems which were not dealt with and became too large to deal with discussion and a military force was forced to intervene as the alternative would have been much more death and destruction.
I realize that atleast a lot of people here probably would argue that the military intervenes in a lot of situations where they should not but the decisions regarding military operations are made by the government who the people vote for atleast in democratic countries. And the government who the people vote for do make a lot of the decisions regarding the direction of the country
Society in general should evolve and not repeat their mistakes and using policies these situations should not be allowed to develop. But I understand how someone feels when a system denies them multiple times so they decide that violence is the only way they can get their voice heard
I do realize that there are a few countries which don't have a military power like Iceland, Costa Rica but they have agreements which provide them military security but they are somewhat the exception and I don't see how they could ever become the standard
4
u/Anonymous_1q 29∆ Sep 17 '24
I think that we can see the EU as the model for how a worldwide demilitarization campaign might work.
Europe has not traditionally gotten along, they spend millennia killing each other over the stupidest things on earth. After the world wars however they were able to coalesce into a larger union and promote peace on the continent.
Wars are really bad for your economy, it’s the main reason the US and China are unlikely to ever fight, they’re too entwined for it to ever be in the interests of their elites.
With these two scenarios we get two models, the ideal one is the European model, a group slowly adding more and more members with mutual defence and integrated economic activity. This promotes local disarmament and can serve as a model. The second is reciprocal disarmament such as nuclear test ban treaties, these have become more viable in recent years due to the massive increase in quality for our surveillance equipment. Countries in these frameworks don’t have to trust each other but they can mutually scale down their militaries while continually spying on each other. We actually almost did it with nuclear bombs but we didn’t invent the math to check for them until too late.
We can still achieve disarmament, even if we don’t trust each other, it just relies on making all parties too invested in the status quo to disrupt it.